Antinuclear

I’ve spent my life fighting nuclear. Here’s what Dutton isn’t telling you about his reactors

Peter Garrett, Musician, activist and former politician, March 30, 2025 ,  https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/i-ve-spent-my-life-fighting-nuclear-here-s-what-dutton-isn-t-telling-you-about-his-reactors-20250327-p5ln3e.html

Today’s voter has it tough, especially younger Australians who get much of their information from apps. It’s daunting to sort fact from fiction in the Wild West world of online media, where hidden agendas and speculative opinion are rife. All the more so when a party’s policy only truly makes sense if viewed through a wider lens.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s promise to build seven small-scale nuclear reactors, ostensibly to help meet future energy needs while keeping carbon emissions at bay, therefore needs to be seen for what it really is: a staggeringly bad idea, a stunt and a con. It is a backdoor attempt to pander to the fossil-fuel lobby – and under the electoral spotlight, more people will figure that out.

Younger voters understandably won’t know that a generation their age once packed the Sidney Myer Music Bowl with Midnight Oil, INXS and other friends to “Stop the Drop”. They won’t remember our Nuclear Disarmament Party campaign, which won Senate seats in Western Australia and NSW in the ’80s. They can’t know what it was like to grow up during the Cold War era or live through horrific meltdowns at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants, which were also “completely safe” until the day that they weren’t. But generations Y and Z can still smell a rotten idea when they give it a good sniff.

At first blush, nuclear energy is causing less concern to younger voters, who haven’t yet taken a closer look. When they do, they will find that most experts and qualified observers view the proposal as expensive, difficult to implement, prone to significant uncertainty and full of rubbery figures.

One example is the fanciful assumption that nuclear plants could be built in 12 years. Twenty years would be more likely – if they are built at all. Cost overruns and safety issues are equally certain. And the carbon consequences of prolonging our old coal-fired power generators are dire.

This deceptive proposal has all the Trumpian hallmarks: a quasi policy announcement intended to serve sectional interests – in this case, fossil-fuel conglomerates – while simultaneously serving up a cartoon enemy as ideological whipping boy, namely renewable energy.

Australia has abundant sunlight, plenty of wind, plus lots of pumped hydro resources that can all be converted by increasingly efficient technologies. Stored batteries are ramping up, too. The butterfly has emerged from the chrysalis and taken to the skies – the renewable energy transition is well under way. Construction costs will keep coming down. Supply will keep going up. The future is already here.

By wrenching the country off this course, Dutton’s plan would leave old, dirty, coal-fired power stations staggering on at increasing risk of breakdown, putting off the day of reckoning when we finally stop polluting and heating our world and get on with using affordable, reliable energy that does not cause more climate chaos.

What possible reason is there for Australia to embark on building a completely new, expensive energy infrastructure we don’t need and which, incidentally, is already illegal in states where the reactors are meant to go?

Nuclear energy features eye-watering costs, which history repeatedly shows blow out. It features risks associated with managing radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years. It is also a massive safety risk from both accidents and attacks.

To cap the charade, this policy comes from the parties that supposedly champion free enterprise and want to reduce government spending, yet the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to fund the Coalition’s nuclear plan are to be borne by all of us, the taxpayer. Go figure!

March 31, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics